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About Tuberider

If he has a good sized deposit and is confident he can let it out, then i'd say it's about as safe an investment as any other these days.
As other posters have said, even if he ends up subsidizing it with a couple of grand a year, it's still better than paying it into a pension which he may never see, or piling it up as savings which can be seized or inflated away.
I know it's a cliche but there really is nothing safer than property IMO, unless you are highly leveraged. and even then, you might still get away with it.

The gas should be available for domestic consumption by 2018. This means our electricity cost will halve. A huge advantage to consumers and businesses on the island.
I know the negative climate is all-pervading right now, but the gas is there. It exists. It is extractable. We have major players involved like TOATL/ KOGAS/ENI. Israel and Lebanon have expressed strong interest in exporting their reserves via our (future) liquefaction terminal. It is real. it is happening.
Turks have always been there. If we worried about the Turks every time we farted, we'd never get out of bed.

Much as I would like a concise, clear and well-thought out plan to emerge from our political class for Cyprus to leave the Euro, I don't think it is going to happen with this government.
The political costs are far more terryfying than the economic ones, and they will not risk it.
The government will hold on, until the gas starts to flow in 2018.
600 billion is a lot of money.

Never seen prices like that here, so i'm with Copydude on this one.
Of course, tourist traps do exist in Cyprus, and people get ripped off from time to time as they might in any holiday resort. But it's not the norm.
Pint of good local beer is what, 1.50 to 3 euros depending on where you are
MT, next time your mate is over here tell him about the following:
Aristos and Kiki - Cineplex road near the beach lights. Incredibly good kebabs, full of locals. 4 people eat til you bust around 45 euros total
Tsolias - underworld meze joint, tucked away in town behind Makarios ave. great food, just don't make eye contact with anyone.
Neo Falliron - near the big starbucks by the law courts. Top quality. Lots of oligarch wannabe's and business people, but prices reasonable around 20 euros per head
Kalimera India - best Indian in Limassol, opposite Rio Cinema. Huge curries, rice and japati for 7.50 euros. website: kalimeraindia.com
Chris Blue Beach at Curium Beach. Good food, great setting, prices are very reasonable.
Anywhere in Saripolou square, especially Kanela.
The Woodman - opposite Dassoudi beach. Top pub grub but gets very busy.
Terra e Mare opposite Hawai Grand.
La Boca (Italian) in Colombia Plaza, St Andrew's St
3 Alonia in Ayios Tychonas village - great meze
List is endless. if you want to eat good, fresh and cheap then Cyprus is the place to be. We are obsessed with food.

Four months on, and we seem to be holding up better than I imagined
Unemployment is climbing but the massive exodus of businesses has not materialized (yet)
The gas is going well, too. Noble are conducting their appraisal drill and in 3 months we will know how much gas is in the aphrodite field. Israelis seem interested in exporting their gas via Cyprus too...
...and the kebab joints are still full. i was in Aristos and Kiki's the other night and had to wait for a table for half an hour

I agree, but that's the way they want it. The system might not be broken, it was made that way. The econonmy of New Orleans is booming and has been since Katrina. It's what keeps the wheels of the capitalist system turning. Boom, bust, build, tear down, consume, detox.
Destruction leads to a very rough road but it also breeds creation...

I know what you are getting at, but the American insistence of building homes out of balsa wood is absolutely insane. I live in an earthquake zone and I could not imagine building such a house and living with that risk every day that it could collapse on top of my family.
Things in america may be changing though. I was in NOLA shortly after Katrina, and the devestation was unbelievable. Huge areas devestated, especially in the SE of the city, with areas like St Claude/ lower 9th ward completely destroyed. I was there again last month and I noticed some big new developments downtown near the superdome being built with reinforced concrete skeletons like we do here in the med. the design of these blocks was also decidedly European. Perhaps they are waking up after so many hard lessons.

Building a house now in Cyprus, and yeah by law you have to construct a reinforced concrete skeleton. it's expensive, and more or less doubles up the cost of the build.
Total build cost comes in between 950 - 1200 Euros per square metre. Not sure how that compares with USA/ UK

Wednesday 15 May 2013 17.31 BST
US budget deficit's fall should make European 'austerians' think again
Budget shortfall predicted to drop to 4%, from 10% in 2009, vindicating Obama's policy of US growing its way out of debt
Phillip Inman, Economics correspondent
If only the "austerians" had listened. According to the latest forecasts, the US budget deficit will shrink to 4% of GDP this year.
The slide from 2009's 10.1% budget shortfall is one in the eye for the Tea party and any other advocate of "contractionary expansion".
Worse for the fans of austerity, forecasts published by the US congressional budget office expect the deficit to fall to 2.1% of GDP by 2015 as tax revenues soar.
By comparison, the UK's official forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), expects a budget deficit on a Maastricht treaty basis of 7.6% this year. Not until 2017 will it fall below the Maastricht maximum of 3%.
The Obama administration was regularly battered by critics who said the deficit would balloon without massive budget cuts. The president resisted much of the rhetoric and put in place a stimulus plan. It was weaker than economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz wanted, mainly because constitutionally required cuts in local state spending went ahead regardless. But it was still a stimulus plan and by last year it was helping millions of workers find jobs and this year is making serious inroads into the deficit.
Trevor Greetham, a director at Fidelity Worldwide Investment, congratulated the president on his strategy.
"The anti-austerity camp will get a boost today," he said. "It is increasingly clear that the Obama administration was right to put off fiscal tightening and focus reforms in the medium to long term. America is growing its way out of debt. The deficit is shrinking because tax revenues are coming in better than expected and a rise in house prices has seen the two government-sponsored lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, repay some $95bn (£60bn) to the Treasury.
"The good US fiscal performance stands in stark contrast to the UK, where front-loaded spending cuts and tax rises have hurt the economy and caused a shortfall in government revenues. The OBR expects the deficit to shrink to a manageable level by 2017 but this forecast, like all of the previous ones, relies on sustained economic expansion of 2-3% a year. It is hard to believe this level of growth will be achieved especially as next month will see another year of cuts tacked on the end of what has become a rolling five-year austerity plan."
Greetham is one of the few City investors to say loudly and consistently that austerity was the wrong medicine. In 2011 he contradicted George Osborne's message that the UK was like Greece. He said then it was more like the US and should adopt the same remedy.
And Japan is moving in the same direction. Even now Tokyo is looking to boost government spending by 2% to 3% as it seeks to generate growth and reduce its almost perpetual 10% annual deficits. Alongside this plan is the expansion of the money supply by the Bank of Japan, which together with the spending boost will be the ultimate test of the Keynesian answer to a slump.
Yet many will argue the Obama administration has done enough to show that Keynesianism works and it is only ideology that has hindered growth in the UK and Europe, not the availability of an oven-ready solution.
http://m.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-blog/2013/may/15/us-budget-deficit-austerity-stimulus